Page:The Yellow Book - 04.djvu/124

 because so very young, heard the note of finality in my voice, and looking puzzled but complaisant, reserved further comment on the woman in the unbuttoned boots.

All that follows this, I am unable to tell in Wladislaw's own words; the facts were not given me at one, nor yet at two recitals—they were piled heterogeneously in my mind, just as he told them at odd moments in the months that followed; and that they have arranged themselves with some sort of order is to be accounted for first of all by their dramatic nature, and secondly by the inherent habit of my memory, which often straightens and adjusts, although unbidden, all that is thrown into it, so that I may take things out neatly as I would have them: thus one may pick articles, ordered in one's absence, from the top left-hand drawer in a dressing table.

At half-past eight upon the Sunday it was a very black night indeed in the Rue de Vaugirard. Wladislaw had well-nigh fallen prone over the broken Moorish lamp, now frozen firmly in the gutter which was the centre of the impasse; he had made his way round by the sculptor's studio, found the door unlocked, and being of a simple, unquestioning temperament, had strolled into the untidy, remote little annexe which communicated by a boarded passage with the handsome atelier. A small tin lamp of the kind a concierge usually carries, glassless, flaming at a cotton wick with alcoöl à brüler, was withstanding an intermittent buffeting by a wind which knew the best hole in the window to come in at. Wladislaw nearly lost half of his long light-brown moustache by lighting his cigarette at it in a draught.

It was cold, and he had to undress to his skin; the comfort of